A Cold-Blooded Business (24 page)

"Ouch!" Kate tried to get a hand around Toni's arm, difficult to do as it was clad in a thick parka. Toni kneed her in the gut. "Oooff!"

Snow blew into Kate's eyes and down the neck of her shirt. Her jeans were wet through all the way up to her knees, her feet numb in her safety boots. She gathered all her strength and, just as Toni managed to free herself to scramble away, brought clenched fists down on the back of Toni's head. The other woman groaned and went limp for a moment, and Kate, who felt the reverberation of that blow all the way up her spine, let herself fall forward, a dead weight, across Toni's body. Another groan, another moment of blessed stillness beneath the roar of wind and whip of snow.

And then damned if the bitch didn't start to fight again. Kate couldn't believe there was that much fight beneath that sleek, pampered exterior.

"Shit!"

They rolled together in the snow, each struggling to find a choke hold on the other, until Kate's back fetched up hard against something else.

She thought it must be the cairn again and was surprised to look up and see the pipe and valve assembly of the abandoned wellhead.

While she was distracted Toni slugged her in her right breast and pain radiated over her body in waves. Someone screamed. When she opened her eyes again Toni was scrabbling to her knees.

A hot, visceral fury caught her up by the scruff of the neck and launched her at the other woman like a ball out of a cannon. They went over the fence surrounding the wellhead and down together at the foot of the wellhead, hard, Toni harder because she was underneath. Somehow in the middle of all that red rage Kate got her hands inside the neck of Toni's parka and began to squeeze. At first Toni fought, but as Kate's hands tightened she ran out of air.

Still lost in that red mist, Kate squeezed harder. Toni choked and cawed, her clawing hands unable now to grab with any strength.

"Kate!" Chris Heller's voice came from behind. "Kate! Stop it! Let go!"

A new pair of hands reached around her to pull at her own. "Let go!"

There is danger. Once again, Cindy Sovalik's voice rang in Kate's ears.

There is danger.

Shuddering, her grip loosened, falling away from Toni's throat, and with a great, hawking cough Toni sucked air into her lungs.

"Jesus, Kate!" Chris Heller looked out at her from a terrified face.

Kate crawled to her feet, to stand on unsteady legs.

Toni looked up and saw her. "Fucking bitch," she croaked, and kicked out, connected with Kate's right knee.

A sharp shooting pain shot up Kate's right leg and it almost buckled.

At once the rage was back. Without stopping to think, she swooped down on the other woman and forced her to her knees in front of the wellhead.

"Lick it," she shouted over the roar of the wind, shoving Toni's face close to the pipe.

"Kate! Are you crazy?" Chris said, trying ineffectually to separate the two women.

"No," Kate yelled, shrugging him off. "Lick it." The wind howled.

The snow swirled around their heads and slipped beneath their knees.

"No," Toni croaked.

"Kate!" Chris said. "No!"

"Lick it," Kate growled for the third time. She caught both Toni's hands in a grip that made the brunette cry out and with the other hand pinched Toni's nose between a thumb and forefinger. The tour guide thrashed about wearily, trying to free herself.

Kate's gulping breaths scorched her lungs, her thundering pulse battered her eardrums, the muscles in her legs quivered in bewildered exhaustion, but her hands and her voice remained relentless. "Lick that pipe!"

"Damn you," Toni gasped, at the end of her endurance, almost weeping.

"God damn you. You're supposed to be dead. You're supposed to be fucking dead."

"Do it! Now!"

Toni gave another halfhearted heave but Kate's grip was relentless. Her breath exploded out of her chest into a white cloud, instantly dissipated on the wind. A moment later Kate smelled the acrid odor of warm piss and knew she had won. Toni opened her mouth and stuck her tongue out. It flattened out against the pipe and in the freezing temperature instantly froze to the metal. She moaned in impotent protest.

Kate rose and staggered back a step. Toni made as if to move but she was held more securely than if she had been bound hand and foot.

Chris was driven to his knees by a gust of wind. "Jesus, Kate," he shouted, "we can't leave her out here. She'll freeze to death." "Good,"

Kate said.

"Kate!"

"It's a spring blizzard," Kate said. Her fury had been replaced by fatigue, leaving her limp and trembling. "It'll probably stop as soon as it started. It'll warm up then."

She staggered back to the cairn and sifted through the snow until she found the stone Toni had thrown. She replaced the stone on the top of the pile. As she looked, the cairn seemed to grow clearer in color and shape, more solid in outlook, and she realized that she had been right, the wind wasn't blowing as hard as it had been.

Toni's sobs were audible from where she stood. "Am ee-eeng! El! El!

Uh-uhee el eel"

"You're crazy, you know that, Shugak?" Chris said, his voice shaken.

"You are fucking insane."

There is danger, Cindy Sovalik had said.

Turning, Kate tripped over the scratcher. Picking it up, she cradled it in her arms against the blowing snow, all the way back to the dugout.

Why didn't they lock the door on you?"

"Skid doors don't lock, from either side. Besides, they'd have had to lock all three, the one to Skid 7, the one back to the control skid, and the emergency exit. They didn't think they had to. For all they knew I was still seriously out of it, and ess-oh-two works pretty fast, or so they told me in orientation."

"Usually you don't even have time to smell it before it kills you," John King agreed, his face tight and his voice grim. "You were lucky."

Jack looked out of his living-room window, an elaborately casual set to his shoulders.

"So it was Hartzler and Mcisaac, with help from Mccord," Childress said.

He gave Kate a sharp look. "That it?"

"Plus whoever sold the stuff to Hartzler in the first place in town, but finding them's your job. You wanted the stuff off the Slope. It's off."

For now, she thought.

He gave a curt nod, probably thinking the same thing.

"About the thefts from the archaeological dig," Kate said.

"What about them?" King said.

"Otto started talking the minute I got back inside the dugout and didn't shut up until Childress showed. Jerry Mcisaac tucked the southbound artifacts in the stretcher next to the medevac patients. As you know, those patients are fork lifted up onto the plane."

"No security check," Childress said, making a note.

"Exactly. There's no telling how much went south since the dig opened."

"Hartzler's playing it cute right to the end," Childress said. "She's not talking, and so far the police haven't found any records."

Kate nodded. "I didn't find anything on the Slope, either. I'd bet she ran everything on a cash basis. The best hope you have of finding either connection is to have someone sit on her phone and pray they call before the story hits the news. Right now Chris Heller's checking the inventory they've been keeping on artifacts received. He's a bright boy, that Heller," Kate added. "He caught on to the fact that things were disappearing his first week up. He's trying to contact the members of Leckerd's first dig team now, to find out if any of them saw anything suspicious."

"I don't give a shit about a bunch of stone knives and bear claws," John King barked.

"I do," Kate barked back. He glared at her and she met it with one of her own. "One of the archaeologists was telling me there's a law, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. It was passed in 1979. A couple of years ago they added on to it, making damage to an archaeological dig a felony."

"So?" "A federal felony," Kate said.

"So?"

"So," Childress said, eyeing Kate, "if they skate on the drug charges, as has been known to happen a time or two, the U.S. attorney nails them on the--what was it? The Archaeological Resources Protection Act. Not a bad idea, Shugak." Childress said it grudgingly, but he did say it.

Of course he immediately dissipated any goodwill generated by the remark by adding, "I still say RPetco Security could have handled this problem."

"Yes," Kate agreed, "you could have, just as well as I did and, simply by virtue of the fact your people know the Slope and I didn't, probably better." Childress was taken aback and showed it. "But not as fast. I got lucky. I knew one of the players, and he knew me and knew what I did for a living. If I wasn't suspicious of Jerry Mcisaac at first, he was of me. When he passed those suspicions on to Toni Hartzler ... "

Kate shrugged. "AH I had to do was sit back and let things happen."

And nearly get killed two or three times in the process, Jack agreed silently.

John King rose to his feet and held out an envelope. "Your last paycheck."

She took it. "King?"

"What?"

"Mind telling me what that Christmas tree's doing on Tode Point?"

"None of your goddam business," Childress said.

King silenced him with an upraised hand. The light reflected off the lenses of his glasses and hid his expression. "It was an exploration well back in the sixties. A duster." "That's not what I asked you. I asked you what it's doing on Tode Point."

"It was a duster," he growled, irritated. "It was plugged and abandoned years ago."

Kate nodded. "King, the most important stipulation in a state oil and gas lease requires that all structures be removed and the site returned to its original state."

King's face went brick-red. "The fucker's been out there for twenty years!"

Kate's voice remained calm, even pleasant. "Tode Point is a national archaeological site as well as a Native Alaskan cultural heritage site.

There shouldn't be a wellhead there. There shouldn't even be a well there. I'd bet every dime you paid me there never was a lease for it."

He met her calm, even speech with blustering sarcasm. "And just what do you expect me to do about it?"

"I expect you to move it. Now. I expect you to tear down that fence, dismantle that wellhead and pick up every stone of gravel you laid down within a mile of that dugout. I expect you to reseed the area, and then I expect you to pray the grass grows fast and the geese come back even faster." She smiled in the teeth of his snarl and Childress's furious curse. "Those archaeologists found a burial site last week, King. If you prefer, I could try talking them into believing it was the grave of a legendary shaman, the dugout a shrine and the whole area sacred ground."

Still smiling, she added, "It shouldn't be too hard.

They're very grateful to me for catching Otto in the act."

John King opened his mouth to blast her ears back and Jack spoke from the window. "King. May I remind you, Kate is Ekaterina Shugak's granddaughter."

King's mouth shut with an audible snap. As hydrocarbon centric as he was, even John King had heard of Ekaterina Shugak. There was a short, fulminating silence. Finally he growled, "Okay. We'll move the fucking Christmas tree."

"And the fence, and the gravel, and reseed the area."

"I said we'd do it!" he bellowed, and stamped outside, followed by Childress, who slammed the door so hard the house shook.

"Well." Jack stood to thrust his hands in his pockets and roam restlessly about the living room. "Once again I do my best to get you killed, and once again fail miserably."

"Don't."

"Okay," he said. "Ever again." He'd been avoiding looking at her, avoiding looking at the spectacular shiner covering most of the right side of her face in a gorgeous medley of royal purple and mustard yellow.

"Cut it out," Kate said, with more force this time.

He took a deep breath, exhaled. "Sorry. Didn't mean to go all Neanderthal on you."

She had to smile. "Sure you did. Jack?"

"What?"

"No more narcotics cases, okay? Drugs have a way of making the smartest people stupid, stupid and greedy. I don't want to have to witness it firsthand."

"No more narcotics cases," he agreed.

"No more Slope cases, either."

He was startled and showed it. "Why not? Hell, you don't even have to make your own bed when you work on the Slope."

"Because you don't even have to make your own bed when you work on the Slope. It's not real. And it's dangerous." She paused, and he waited.

"It scared me."

"Scared you how?" She thought about it for a moment. "I liked it," she said at last, frowning a little. "The place is unreal and the people are out of control and I liked it. I liked steak on Tuesday and Thursday and prime rib on Sunday. I liked not having to make my own bed or cook my own meals or wash my own dishes. I liked being six hundred air miles from any responsibility of any kind except for doing my job. I liked the money. I liked the gang-beeping and the turtle races and

Belle's little cowboy outfit and the Japanese guy looking for the ban goon I liked it a lot."

"Get thee behind me, Satan," he suggested. "Why, Kate, you may be human after all." Quickly, before she could snap a reply, he said, "About that lease language you quoted to King? I thought you said restoration of the site was at the discretion of the commissioner?"

She shrugged. "If he can't be bothered to look up the original language himself, too bad."

Jack's grin was involuntary and quickly hidden. There was a brief pause.

"You were a little hard on Hartzler, weren't you?"

"She got most of her tongue back, what do you want?"

"She got frostbite in both hands and both feet, too," Jack pointed out dryly.

"Them's the breaks. A good thing she's going where she won't have to worry about turning up the heat."

He shook his head. "You are one hard-nosed bitch, Shugak."

"You do say the sweetest things." She ran a hand through her hair. "I guess I'd better call the railroad, see what time the train leaves tomorrow."